Patricia's Song
by Draenog Glas
Summary: "As Garfield would say, 'I hate Mondays.' Except apply it to Christmas." Peacock faintly remembers the last Christmases she spent before she became a machine, and slightly questions why she was chosen to destroy the only person who comforted her through all the red snow and the steel blue skies.


The winter was soothing, and I saw nothing in that impenetrable mountain of frothing snow, and I shivered, and I smoked another cigar, letting the words fall to the floor like the same white behemoth that greeted me at the windows. I don't remember anything of my last Christmas, of what I was like before I became this killing machine, but I enjoyed my existence now, and not as someone who was claimed to be a slave. The words fluttered, little metaphorical butterflies, until they were eaten by Avery, telling me that I couldn't watch television anymore, but I thought, forget it. I wanted to forget everything about Christmas. The memory seems painful, the images thorny and blurry and hot and bleeding into my mind, and I didn't want anything to do with the shitty holiday. Dress up as Santa, give shitty presents to children, ho ho ho! Then shoot yourself in the damn head because apparently everyone is so depressed on Christmas. Boo hoo. My wife and children left me. Try not drinking, ya boozer.

Humor aside, Leduc and Hive wanted to experience Christmas again, and I told them to can it and I wanted nothing to do with it. They called me a Scrooge, and yes, I certainly was an ol' Ebenezer, because my girlfriend dumped me or some crap like that. Dr. Avian personally was an atheist and didn't believe in traditional American holidays or a traditional American God, but he left with them in tow. I was alone. And I liked things that way.

Christmas specials were on, and it was full of cheery bullshit. Rudolph being a freak of nature that wasn't even supposed to survive beyond infancy and helped Santa with his shining clitoris nose. Then Frosty telling people it was their birthday when my birthday was an even worse time to be reminded of my existence, and I shut the TV off and just tried to sleep, shutting off the distant sounds of snowflakes denting against the screen and the carolers singing about Jesus. Avian often shooed them away, announcing his atheism to them, but they kept coming back, telling him about Jesus and how he should accept him as his own personal savior and all that crap. He shuts the door on them and closes the blinds and the entire lab is painted in darkness. His hands were old and crooked and he spent his entire life trying to build the perfect machine to destroy the Skullgirl, but he didn't do it to get to heaven or even from the goodness of his heart. It was all out of necessity. The Skullgirl had to be destroyed. That was the ifs and butts about it. Not that kind of butt, eh? Whatever. I'm trying to be funny.

Christmas really wasn't joyous, the more I thought about it. Suicides increased. Sad sob stories about people losing their families and their friends and even their dog and they get all upset about it and claim Chwistmas is wuined.

Okay, all joking aside though, I think I experienced that before. I guess you can say I have my own personal sob story, but I can't help but think I wished I could be like that dork Leduc and Hive and actually enjoy the holiday like normal people. People usually called those who hated the holiday misers and they're spending the entire holiday all locked up in their rooms, yadda yadda. I had some happy Christmases, honestly. But it was at a time that I can barely remember them. When I was a young girl and my eyes were tangible and my hands were made of flesh and bone and blood.

First Christmas, they gave me some baby toys, all wrapped in shining pink wrapping paper. They said they were proud of me. Proud of being such a tight-knit family. I watched my morning cartoons and was entranced by them. Guy who was tall, with a scraggly beard, I think he had orange sideburns too, said that I loved my cartoons and next time he'll get me a Mickey Mouse toy. Of course, I pronounce it as "Mikey Mowse". Children are dumb.

I don't remember who this guy was. He just, seemed to hold me, and I felt relaxed, and watched the snow fall like it was some kind of Thomas Kinkade painting. The light oscillated on the snow and it was a glistening pink. The street lights were pink too, and the morning just barely was scratched open with a nail, preparing to bleed. I smile. I smiled, not in a crazy way, but in an honest, happy way. I was happy. Happy is a weird word, when you think about it.

Her hair was curly, orange, and it smelled faintly of peaches and ginger blossoms. I knew in my heart that I loved her, and I crawled onto her lap and listened to her heart on her delicate stomach. I don't remember these people, yet there's that fondness. There's that feeling that I loved them. And we watched the Christmas tree sprinkle its light all over the dark contours of our house and I was glad that light was there. I was comforted by it. The light used to be with me at one time, but it seemed to disappear as soon as the war happened.

Snow wasn't beautiful anymore. It was stained with red. It wasn't pink, but it seemed as if it was a wound, gushing its sadness as much as I gushed mine.

The men came, and they told me that I didn't clean fast enough. Not to their standards. They said they hated me. They thought I was disgusting. Spit in my face. They had such large, round thumbs that could tear my eyeballs apart with their dexterous human fingers. Human fingers that were so human, I wondered how they could harm and kill a little girl.

I'm getting all sappy, am I? Well, too bad folks, you're getting the whole sob story because you wondered why Christmas was awful for me. You can't get out of this story now, unless you click the Back button on your browser, but you wouldn't do that, would you?

I remembered how red that snow was. How sticky it was. I remembered those senses clearly because by then, that light had gone out of my life. I was blind. No one told me where I was. I fumbled around the snow banks and tripped and fell and tried to use my ears to hear the snow falling softly around me, the wind pricking me with its icy teeth, but I was lost completely, on Christmas eve, and the men just laughed and continued to spit on me. They left me alone to die out there, and I knew it probably wouldn't be long before that happened. It was something I expected eventually, when they murdered my those people who once loved me and took the nice-smelling lady to their den where they sexually abused her mercilessly until she bled to death from her torn vagina and uterus.

I heard a shallow voice, a cold hand that felt like I was touching someone's dead corpse that sat in the freezer for too long, and she whispered me to come. She was a little girl, I knew, and I trusted her. There was something in her I trusted, because she wasn't a man.

We said nothing. I could hear the wind whipping outside, the screens clattering and about to shatter. The house was cold, like her, but it wasn't as cold as the outside. She held my hand, and I shivered, but continued to follow her. I smelled something. Something that came out of the oven. She led me to sit down on a small chair and the smell became overwhelming, but that was good. That was a good thing. The smell was sweet, and I could smell ginger, like that woman's hair. Relax she said, but I knew I was dying and it wouldn't be long before I would collapse and decay before her. She said I had to be quiet, else the men will hear and figure out we were not working and torture us some more. Said she had something that could kill them, but I didn't listen at all to her plan. I kept searching out for the sweet thing, what that smell of ginger and cinnamon could lead me to, and I heard the clatter of a fork on a dining plate and I tasted the sweet thing. It was pumpkin. Pumpkin pie.

And I remembered that this was the best pumpkin pie I ever tasted, yet this memory brought so many negative thoughts and feelings that a good warm pumpkin pie shouldn't bring you. I tried to cry from my holed sockets but couldn't find myself having the strength to. She kept feeding me pumpkin pie and trying to hush me. I was a baby being consoled by food and a warm blanket and warm arms. I didn't care at all if the men saw me in this state, wanting to be swaddled and this mother-like figure trying to make me not cry anymore. She loved me. No one had ever loved me before except those two people in my childhood that I can't remember. She kissed me on the head and sung a song that I thought, with my soiled ears, that she was talking about catching things through the rye. The rye. The rye. I knew rye was a type of plant, used to make bread with. Fields of rye. Fields of rye swaying in the wind. Me being there, such a young child, so happy, I swam through the rye and saw the other children playing, laughing, and I laughed too as I saw them gathered playing games like hopscotch or tag or follow the leader. I thought I had wings. I had wings that were reminiscent of an angel. They shined like the pale sun in the brown sky. I wanted to protect them all, this little utopia of innocence we had. No adults, no men could harm us. We were just children playing our little games near this cliff, and I would pick them up, put them back on the cliff, and they would go back to their games. I didn't want them to grow up to be like those men. Nasty, nasty men. What happened to them as children that made them that way? What made them suddenly believe that there was no one watching out for them and that God was an obsolete concept and they took us and wrung us like dirty soiled cloths? She tried to answer my questions through thickened sobs. She said she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure at all what could lead these men to become such cold-hearted bastards.

I could sense the sky was a cold blue that morning. Christmas scents were touching my bleeding nose. I asked her if Santa gave us presents this year. She said she wasn't sure if the presents were any good, but she said she would try to make the best use of them. She said Santa would give us a second chance this Christmas, a second chance to live our lives.

I thought she was just lying out of her ass, but I just went with it at the time. I knew that Santa crap was just a lie from parents to think their children are so goddamn adorable, but at the time, I really wished Santa was real, and I wanted him to give me another slice of pumpkin pie for Christmas. And yes, a second chance. A second chance sounded nice. Wrapped up in shining pink paper.

I died shortly after.

Then somehow, I was met with a woman with what looked like a bunch of intestines all wrapped up in her arms and body, and she told me I was given a second chance, and a second name.

Peacock.

It was so weird, how shortly after I wished Santa was real, that God was real, I became a machine that was supposed to kill the girl that comforted me during my last moments.

I have no option, either way. It was my duty, and it was what I was programmed to do.

So yeah, like Garfield would say "I hate Mondays," I hate Christmas.

I also hate pumpkin pie. What a lousy dessert. Pumpkins didn't even seem edible in the first place.

How could I believe in a God when He wasn't tangible like my eyes?

How could I believe in the rancor of Hope, that light that once guided me, when everything was black?

The color red is an ugly color, now that I think about it.

I sung about catching the children through the rye again, and Avian ushered the other children to their rooms and closed my door gently to not hear my crying.


End file.
